QNet

QNet, originally launched as GoldQuest and later renamed QuestNet, was founded in Hong Kong in 1998 by Vijay Eswaran and Joseph Bismark and is now owned by the QI Group. It began selling commemorative coins and later expanded into jewelry, watches, wellness devices, nutrition products, and travel packages through a multi-level representative network operating primarily across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. The company has pursued high-visibility sponsorships, including a multi-year partnership with Manchester City F.C., and frames its business model through Eswaran's "RYTHM" philosophy, presenting recruitment as personal and spiritual development rather than sales.

QNet's Indian operations, run through franchisee Vihaan Direct Selling Private Limited, have drawn sustained criminal-enforcement attention since at least 2013, when Mumbai's Economic Offences Wing began arresting distributors -- including Michael Ferreira's former daughter-in-law -- on charges of cheating and forgery, while Ferreira himself, the former world amateur billiards champion and an alleged 80-percent shareholder in Vihaan, was chargesheeted and denied anticipatory bail; the Bombay and Delhi High Courts repeatedly declined to quash the proceedings or grant bail, and India's Enforcement Directorate and Securities and Exchange Board of India separately pursued the company and Vihaan under securities and money-laundering statutes. Indian authorities blocked QNet-linked websites in 2014 amid an alleged Rs 425 crore fraud, after investor protests spread in Bangalore and Chennai. Outside India, national authorities in Rwanda (2009, after the National Bank of Rwanda described the company as a pyramid scheme), Nepal (2003), Sri Lanka (2005, citing an estimated $15 million outflow), Sudan and Syria (2009), and Saudi Arabia have banned or formally warned against the company's operations; Indonesian authorities arrested Eswaran on fraud allegations via Interpol in 2007; he was released about three weeks later and the charges were dismissed. QNet disputes every pyramid-scheme characterization and continues to operate and recruit in most of these markets.

QNet is scored here at Medium confidence: no single court has issued a final, non-appealable finding of criminal or civil liability against the parent company globally, and QNet's own defense -- that enforcement actions reflect misunderstanding or persecution of a legitimate direct-selling business -- remains formally live in ongoing Indian proceedings. What distinguishes QNet from an ordinary MLM is the sheer breadth and duration of multi-jurisdiction criminal and regulatory attention it has sustained for over two decades, combined with a recruitment culture that leans on diaspora, community, and quasi-spiritual loyalty framing (via RYTHM) to raise the cost of exit for participants who might otherwise leave after a single adverse enforcement headline.